Michael Kownacky

Everyone needs a little fantasy from time to time, and on this week’s Sunday Opera (5/17 2026), we’ve got some in the guise of a libretto by Siegfried Wagner for his opera “an allem ist Hutchen Schuld!” (“Everything Is Little-Hat’s Fault!”). This fairytale opera about an invisible, mischievous goblin named “Little-Hat” or “Hattie,” was cobbled together from a number of the stories of The Brothers Grimm with a little Hans Christian Anderson thrown in.

We’re turning to two of Richard Strauss’ lesser-known one-act operas on this week’s Sunday Opera (5/10 3:00 p.m.): “Daphne” and “Feuersnot” (“The Need for Fire” or “Lack of Fire”).

With his various writing partners, Richard Rodgers composed over 40 musicals, and many of those shows contained ballets – some more than one, and on this week’s Dress Circle (5/10 7:00 p.m.) we’re going to look at two ballets from musicals Rodgers wrote with Lorenz Hart as well as a ballet he wrote to be performed by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Metropolitan Opera House.

We’re going for Baroque again on this week’s Sunday Opera (5/3 3:00 p.m.) with a forgotten opera that is finally getting some much deserved recognition: Leonard Vinci’s “Artaserse,” an opera that premiered in Rome in 1730.

Each month has an animal associated with it, and May is associated with the squirrel. Who knew? Well, this week’s Dress Circle (5/3 7:00 p.m.) is definitely not squirrelly in any stretch of the imagination as we look at overtures and opening numbers from 11 of the musicals that opened this month.

Beethoven is probably the best known composer of one-and-done when it comes to operas. However, there were others, and on this week’s Sunday Opera (4/26 3:00 p.m.), we’re focusing on one of those: Robert Schumann’s 1850 work “Genoveva" based loosely on an event in the life of Genevieve de Brabant.

Like all months, April is a month of many celebrations. We’ve already looked at shows that opened in 1965 in order to celebrate National 8-Track Tape Day – We are fully committed to our calendar art, and on this week’s Dress Circle (4/26 7:00 p.m.), we’ll be looking at something we think everyone needs right now: Songs of hope from the musicals as April is the National Month of Hope.

Franz Schreker was another composer whose work was censured because of the rise in anti-Semitism in Germany in the early 1930’s, and he went from being hailed as the future of German opera to obscurity. We’ll celebrate the music of Schreker which is said to be a lush mixture of Romanticism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, and Expressionism on this week’s Sunday Opera (4/19 3:00 p.m.).

So many stage musicals were destroyed by Hollywood when they were adapted into films. Often, entire scores were thrown out, and other times, two or three songs, and on this week’s Dress Circle (4/19 7:00 p.m.), we’ve put together a program of some of the songs that never made it Hollywood with the rest of the show.

This week’s Sunday Opera (4/12 3:00 p.m.) is turning to the work of a mostly forgotten Czech composer, Pavel Haas through his only opera, written in 1936, “Sarlatan,” “The Charlatan.”